ANATOMY OF TORTURE — Historian Christopher Dietrich on the 100-year-long history of American torture; Jeffrey St. Clair on the implications of giving impunity to the CIA’s torturers; Chris Floyd on how the US has exported torture to its client states around the world. David Macaray on the Paradoxes of Police Unions; Louis Proyect on Slave Rebellions in the Open Seas; Paul Krassner on the Perils of Political Cartooning; Martha Rosenberg on the dangers of Livestock Shot-up with Antibiotics; and Lee Ballinger on Elvis, Race and the Poor South. Plus: Mike Whitney on Greece and the Eurozone and JoAnn Wypijewski on Media Lies that Killed.

Prefigurative Vegetarianism

by JON HOCHSCHARTNER

Sylvia Pankhurst, a socialist, Ethiopian nationalist and a feminist, practiced prefigurative vegetarianism for some time, apparently out of concern for non-human animals.

According to John P. Gerber, Pankhurst’s publication ‘Workers’ Dreadnought’ was in Britain a “major theoretical center of left communism.” Pankhurst’s contacts included a veritable who’s who of the European left. “She was in close touch with leading revolutionaries in Russia (Alexandra Kollantai), Germany (Clara Zetkin), Holland (Herman Gorter, Anton Pannekoek, Henrietta Roland Horst), Italy (Antonio Gramsci and Amadeo Bordiga) and even Hungary (Bela Kun),” according to Barbara Winslow. Vladimir Lenin criticized Pankhurst directly in his 1920 book ‘Left Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder” for her opposition to electoral reformism in Britain.

Interestingly, Pankhurst’s mother, Emmeline Pankhurst, the suffragette leader, was also vegetarian for a time, according to ‘Current Literature, Volume 45′ a publication edited by Edward Jewitt Wheeler. The same source states Pankhurst’s mother was an admirer of the anti-speciesist anarchist Louise Michel, although she did not accept “the erratic woman’s political theories.”

In 1907, Pankhurst, by all indications, ate non-human flesh. Recalling her time in prison early that year for her own feminist activism, she described the difficulties of vegetarians, but did not seem to count herself among this group. “When we had originally been put in the first class, Mrs. Cobden Sanderson, who was a vegetarian, was daily served the usual prison diet, and though she was obliged to leave the meat, no extra vegetables were allowed her, and she was obliged to live on prison and bread,” Pankhurst said. “Now a special dietary had been introduced for vegetarians, which consisted at this season of an alternation of carrots and onions, with occasional rather stale eggs as a substitute for meat, and milk, night and morning, instead of cocoa and tea.”

Decades later, Pankhurst was practicing prefigurative vegetarianism, for how long I’m unsure. But she gave it up following the outbreak of the Second World War. “Another change in the household resulted from the fact its mistress had been until then, on general humanitarian grounds, a vegetarian,” according to her son, Richard Pankhurst. “But with the introduction of rationing — a system which she had advocated in the a First World War and greatly praised on account of its fairness —she felt it ‘more practical’ to turn to meat-eating like the population at large.”

As I’ve mentioned previously, I don’t think individual dietary choices are particularly important to the animal struggle. But I wonder what this abandonment of vegetarianism meant for Pankhurst. Was she giving up what she saw merely as a symbolic gesture toward non-human solidarity? Or did her return to flesh-eating represent the low priority she placed on animal lives and suffering?

In her later years, according to Winslow, “Pankhurst never made any attempt to rejoin or work with her former comrades in the Communist Party. Shocked and horrified by [Joseph] Stalin, she denounced the 1936 Moscow Trials as a brutal farce. Having known and admired [Nikolai] Bukharin in particular, she knew he had been framed by Stalin.” Still, according to Winslow, Pankhurst considered herself a socialist for the remainder of her life. She would die of heart failure in late 1960 at the aged of 78.

Jon Hochschartner is a freelance writer from upstate New York. Visit his website at JonHochschartner.com.